The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

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Yank and bank, boom and zoom. Many young people join the Air Force to fly supersonic jets. But how many join up to for the thrill of spending years in a Nevada trailer, flying planes by remote control? The Xbox is not exactly the Wild Blue Yonder.

Perhaps that's why the Air Force is having problems finding enough volunteers to fly its drones (or Remotely Piloted Aircraft, or RPAs, as the Air Force prefers to call them). And the problem will only get worse as the military flies more unmanned aircraft for surveillance and strike missions.

"The Air Force requirement in Fiscal Year 2012 was to train 1,129 traditional pilots and 150 RPA pilots," says Air Force Col. Bradley Hoagland in a report for the Brookings Institute. "However, the Air Force was not able to meet its RPA training requirements since there were not enough volunteers." While all training slots for undergraduate manned aircraft training were filled, only 82 percent of RPA slots were filled. With the Air Force currently flying 61 drone combat air patrols per day, and with demand for drone pilots set to reach 1,650 in 2017, compared to 1,300 today (and just 50 pilots in the late 1990s), all those sophisticated Predators, Global Hawks and other avian robots may someday have their wings clipped.

Hoagland, an experienced C-130 transport pilot, blames the pilot shortfall on multiple factors, the foremost of which is poor pre-screening of potential pilots that has resulted drone pilots washing out at three times the rate of their manned aircraft counterparts. It is revealing that the lesser qualified pilot candidates are selected for RPA training, and that candidates who wash out of manned aircraft training can still volunteer for drone training. Not surprisingly, when the Air Force began wholesale transfers of manned aircraft pilots to RPA squadrons in 2008, commanders dumped their least capable pilots.

It also doesn't help manned aircraft pilots still dominate the Air Force, and will likely do so for the foreseeable future. RPA pilots have a 13 percent lower promotion rate than their manned counterparts.

Hoagland recommends more aggressive recruitment and better prescreening, including psychological screening. Interestingly, he notes that drone pilots share similar traits to Special Forces snipers, in that long periods of inactivity are punctuated by short bursts of intense activity (though the same can be said for combat pilots in general).

But respect and recognition will help, and that won't be easy. Earlier this year, public outcry killed a Pentagon plan to reward drone pilots and cyber operators with a special medal. True, the medal would have outranked the Bronze Star and Purple Heart awarded for bravery or wounds on the physical battlefield, but the barrage of scornful comments about drone pilot bravery were unlikely to brighten the luster of the field.

In the end, it is true that no medals or promotions will change the fact that soaring in an F-15 is going to be more thrilling than controlling a plane through a video screen. But it is also true that we may be witnessing the final decades of manned combat aircraft. Drones are here to stay.

"The Air Force cannot wait another decade to ensure the RPA community gets professionally developed, recognized, and promoted on par with other officers in the Air Force," says Hoagland.